Honestly, I think the push to constantly add browser features (and thereby expand the already massive web API) is misguided. This feature, in particular, seems like it should be solved with library, rather than by further bloating the browser.
If I put on my conspiracy hat, it looks like Google is pushing to expand the web API as a means to maintain its lead in the browser market by making it harder for other browsers (i.e. Firefox) to maintain feature parity.
I have the same theory but for different reasons(commented something similar to a recent css functions thread), in this case though I don't thing you can solve it with a library, the canvas api is very limited, text layouting is very hard especially if you want to support different languages and directions. Let alone rendering a text input, if the use case is games, those usually don't have very complex inputs and that would be ok I think to implement a simpler one. IMO we should just have exposed the Skia text layout api in javascript.
TBH, the first time I read about this, I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't an April Fool's joke I had missed. I'm sure there are some things this would be useful for, but the sheer amount of complexity it would add to web renderers doesn't seem commensurate with how useful it would be.
This kind of stuff just puts even more distance between established engines and smaller projects like Servo.
You can't solve this with a library without essentially implementing a separate browser engine in JS (or WASM). Doing this directly in the browser engine is far simpler than that.
Not to mention that Canvas is a cornerstone of fingerprinting.
Sure, extend was always the key part of “embrace, extend, and extinguish”.
The browser API has become so big because the implementers are quite tenacious, with multiple parties doing “extend” in parallel…